“Okay,” the British Airways pilot responded. (It) was travelling so fast — in fact you can no longer see it. We were just wondering. We didn’t think it was likely on a collision course, but just wondered what it could have been.

“It was such a bright light and then it disappeared at very high speed …

But it was soon apparent she wasn’t the only to see something strange in the morning sky.

Two more pilots radioed in sightings in the following minutes.

The controlled re-entry and subsequent breakup and fragmentation of the European Space Agency's “Jules Verne” Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) spacecraft. The airline pilots' sightings may have been a similar piece of space debris burning up in the upper atmosphere.Source:Supplied

Virgin Airlines Flight 76 out of Orlando to Manchester cut in, the pilot confirming he had also seen something, a “meteor or another object making some kind of re-entry. There appeared to be multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory. They were very bright from where we were … two bright lights that seemed to bank over to the right and climb away at speed at least from our perspective.”